The First 4,000 Words

Becoming a skilled reader is the foundation on which a person’s success in school and life will largely depend. Yet, two out of every three early-grade students struggle with reading, often because of low vocabularies.

The First 4,000 Words program helps prepare grade 1-4 students to read by increasing their knowledge of the 4,000 most frequently used English words within an interactive and engaging online environment called the Vocabitat™—a vocabulary habitat.

Target Audience

• Grades 1-4
• ELLs & struggling readers

Program Benefits

• Teaches the 4,000 most common and useful English words, which account for 80% of words in a typical text
• Ensures students know the meanings of the words when they hear them or see them in print and that students can pronounce the words
• Provides individualized, self-paced instruction that can be accessed from any computer with an internet connection
• Diagnoses each individual learner by identifying which words they are unfamiliar with
• Includes 355 interactive and engaging web-based lessons organized into 8 levels of proficiency
• Uses game-like scenarios and automated speech recognition (ASR) technology to teach, reinforce, and assess vocabulary listening, reading, and pronunciation
• Students only need to use the program 30 minutes a day / 3 times a week
• Requires little teacher time beyond initial student setup
• Easy-to-use learner management system for initial student placement, monitoring, and reporting
• Research-based and field-tested

How It Works

The First 4,000 Words core instruction uses a validated technique for building oral vocabulary in preschool and primary grade children with small oral vocabularies—often called Shared Book Reading—where students are read a short passage several times with a focus on words in the passage that children are unlikely to know.

Characteristics of effective shared reading are:

• Involves several readings of a number of short books.
• Focuses students’ attention on the words.
• Deliberately stretches students and scaffolds their efforts.
• Employs carefully selected words and books.
• The major problem with the traditional face-to-face, teacher-to-student method is that it is very expensive given the huge amount of teacher time required and it is virtually impossible to individualize the instruction so that each student gets taught just the words he or she needs.

The First 4,000 Words program offers a web-delivered version of this technique that adapts to the unique needs of each learner by identifying only the words they are unfamiliar with. The program is designed with colorful graphics, interesting sound effects, and game-like activities to keep students engaged and motivated.

What Are The First 4,000 Words?

There are 3,805 targeted words for instruction. Most will be accompanied by a picture and a simple statement of meaning. The words were selected from the most frequent words in The Educator’s Word Frequency Guide (Zeno et al. 1995) and the 4,000 word families of Hiebert’s Word Zones™ corpus (2005).

4KW Source List – A list of approximately 4,000 word families sequenced by frequency.

4KW Teaching List – A list of approximately 4,000 word families sequenced by frequency within each of these categories:

• Target words – 3,541
• Function words – 116
• Proper nouns – 148
• The 100 Most Frequent Words